The History of History (18 page)

Margaret tried to calm herself. It was the burden of secrets that was making her crazy, she thought. To have all the pictures playing simultaneously in her head, but trying to follow one single string of speech—it would drive anyone mad.

When she got home
to the Grunewaldstrasse, the hawk-woman was waiting for her on the balcony above her apartment, standing in the cold, still and glassy-eyed like a piece of taxidermy. Margaret was afraid, more than she had been before.

And she thought, then, that the alliance was crumbling.

She shut all the curtains and covered herself in the bed. There was no way to visit a place like Sachsenhausen and try to be a Nazi at the same time.

It can hardly be a coincidence that later that very night, unable to sleep despite her exhaustion, Margaret found another quotation from Ello Quandt.

In March of 1942, Ello said that Magda complained to her of what
Joseph told her. “
It’s horrifying, all the things he tells me. I can’t bear it anymore. You can’t imagine the terrible things he burdens me with, and there’s no one to whom I can open my heart.
”

And what immediately followed stopped Margaret short. It seemed that not long after she complained to Ello, the right side of Magda’s face became paralyzed. This was verifiable, and not exclusively based on Ello’s testimony. Trigeminal neuralgia, said the doctors. Margaret looked up the diagnosis in the encyclopedia. “
The condition can bring about a paralysis of the facial muscles, and stabbing, mind-numbing, electric-shock-like pain from just a finger’s glance to the cheek. Believed to be the most severe type of pain known to human beings …
” And then in May of 1943, a full year later, after Goebbels declared total war and the Wannsee decision went into effect, Magda was operated on, but the operation was unsuccessful: the right side of her face remained paralyzed, the muscles gone slack. Her beauty was gone. Her friends said she looked unwell, her enemies said she looked like a corpse.

Margaret lay in bed for a long time. The minutes passed slowly, and she could not stop her galloping mind.

Shortly after three
in the morning, despite exhaustion, Margaret was awake. A light came into the bedroom from the courtyard. The room was quiet and the light was sharp. Margaret could hear the bang of the trash lid and the thud-whisper of falling papers—someone had turned on the timed lights and was unloading newspapers. Then footsteps moved away. All went quiet.

Without warning a flicker came. Margaret jerked up. A shadow was on the wall, on the right side of the room. At first Margaret thought it was the hawk-woman—maybe she had come nearer, outside the window. Margaret’s heart began to pound. But soon she saw that the shadow was not the shadow of a bird.

It was the shadow of a pair of hands, dexterous and sinister. The hands were moving: they made figures—a duck and a dog. Then one changed, now it was a dog and a stork. Bowing and twittering, miming, putting on a show in the path of the light, a restless pair of hands unable to sleep. The shapes of the animals were vivid and animal-like—adept at the pageant, while at the same time remaining human fingers, as if human flesh could mirror any creation under the sun. Margaret huddled under the covers, watching the movement of the
hands on the wall. Her fear froze her for a moment, and then suddenly it was gone. In each thing, she thought, all things are to be found, and this is innocence—the world bundled into the head of a pin, in the fist of a hand, in the brain of a human, in the sun and in its microcosmic imitation of the universe; all patterns existing potentially in all other patterns, the world full of the energy of things it does not yet know, in its insides and in how it projects itself to the out. Design flows into design, every thing perceives and mirrors every other thing, and becomes more like it.

And then Margaret thought of Magda Goebbels, and of how that woman had been still while patterns moved and changed around her. Magda Goebbels could never be called innocent, no matter what she might have said to Ello Quandt. No matter what she might have said.

After sleeping, Margaret thought, she would have likely forgotten this, as she so often forgot the illumination that came to her during the night.

She heaved herself up from the bed and went to her desk. She thought she would write down what she had learned about innocence.

But instead of beginning to write, she was still and unmoving, and then her hands began to wander on their own, and she found herself opening a book and looking again at the Russian mortuary pictures of Magda’s children at Plötzensee. She looked at their waxen faces. Their nightgowns were white, their faces were still. Margaret pushed her fingers against her head. She thought: Magda Goebbels drank it in. Magda Goebbels knew everything and absorbed it and became stiller and stiller.

Margaret touched her own face. The skin of her forehead felt scaly, unanimated.

Woe to the unthinking, woe to the empty-headed, woe to the unremembering, she thought. For they are the static, the blanketed, the uniformed, the shrouded, the dead in spirit.

M
argaret went back to the doctor. Three days after Sachsenhausen, and there were still dark circles under her eyes. She was dizzy from lack of sleep. That hanging, grey-headed sibyl: she had not been able to pull away from it, nor from the scampering mice.

The small green door in the ivy was unlocked, and before long Margaret was sitting by the tall plastic plant in the waiting room, her body taut and ready. She had a handkerchief in her hands; she wound it around her fingers.

After a while, the doctor’s voice warbled from down the hallway. “Margaret Täubner.”

Margaret rose and walked down the length of the flat. As she neared the doctor’s door, music flowed loud from inside the chamber, a stereo playing at high volume—harpsichord, violin, cello, and soprano.

Somehow—and mark well, it was merely by chance—Margaret had an impulse to open only one panel of the French doors. She turned her shoulders and slipped into the room, and she caught a glimpse of the old woman behind her desk, upright, her giant head wobbling on her narrow neck. The music blared: something seventeenth-century, pure, operatic, without vibrato. What was it? Margaret thought she knew the melody. Yes, it was
Dido and Aeneas
.

Just at the moment of recognition, a very quick and confusing series of stimuli bore down on her. The music reached a height of emotion—the words “in my breast” were sung, full of pain. A dim, silver light passed at high speed across her left shoulder by her ear, from fore to aft, and the air was displaced; a flicker of a breeze puffed her hair. In a fraction of an instant, there was the sound of a
thunk
at the French doors behind her, loud enough to be heard over the ballooning music, followed by a vibrating
twang
. She spun around in the direction of the shuddering.

A small knife quivered in the wood—the panel of the French door
that Margaret had left closed—in a target made of cork attached at eye level, a red- and yellow-striped bull’s-eye. There were two other small steak knives also standing in the target perpendicular. At the sight of the knives, Margaret cried out. She ducked her head in a belated reflex. There was a sense of the room coming apart, as if it had been thrown, the entire box, into black space. The doctor, for her part, held her head rigidly, facing the door. Margaret yelled to the doctor, “Did you just throw a knife?”

“What?”

The music blared painfully beautiful harmonics, shaking the room in a tumbling stretto. And then Margaret could make out the words
remember
, and
fate
plummeting over each other in polyphony.

“Did you throw a knife at the door?” Margaret yelled.

“Comrade! I’m going to have to turn down the music. I can’t hear you.” The doctor trailed her hand against the wall, leading herself to the stereo in the cupboard, where she finally managed to turn off the CD.

In the silence that followed, the rogue knife, long since home in its target, still quivered like a tuning fork. The doctor’s rasping breath marked the time.

“I turned on the music when I heard you were here because I thought you’d help me with the lyrics. I can’t make out what’s being said. You’re a native speaker of English.”

“Yes,” Margaret said, breathing heavily. “I suppose I can.”

“All the music is in English these days. In exchange, now that I’m your mentor, I would help you with the Wagner librettos.”

“I don’t need any help with the Wagner librettos,” Margaret said.

“Oh.” There was a quiet. “The part I’m wondering about is in the beginning of Dido’s lament. It sounds as though she’s saying”—and here the doctor spoke in an English so heavily accented Margaret almost did not recognize it as English—“ ‘May my ahms create no trouble in thy breast.’ ”

“ ‘May my
arms
,’ ” Margaret corrected. “Is that what you said?”

“Yes. Ahms.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know,” the doctor agreed. “What are ahms?”

“
Arrrrrms,
” Margaret said, emphasizing the American
r
. And then in German: “
Arme.
”

“Oh!” the doctor said with excitement. “Comrade, you’re very clever.”

“But still it doesn’t make sense,” Margaret said. “ ‘May my arms create no trouble in thy breast’?” The doctor was now busily scanning the CD. She played the section of track again, and Margaret listened. “May my
wrongs
create no trouble in thy breast,” Margaret said, when she realized what it was.

“You’re lovely, my dear. Very efficient.” The doctor sat down.

But Margaret remained standing, still trembling like the knife. “Did you throw a knife at the door just now?” she asked.

The room around her was dusty and lush. The only light was from the windows, which, with their thick curtains on either side, and their inner blinds of parchment muslin, let through only a dusky light. Margaret noticed that now, in contrast with last time, there was a potted orange tree with lush foliage taking up much of the free space to the left of the examination table, growing halfway to the ceiling. Its leaves seemed to rustle now and then.

“I was practicing my aim,” said the doctor.

“I thought you were blind.”

“Yes, my dear, blind as a badger, which is to say, not entirely blind, but mostly. My dear child, I have to have regular practice sessions for myself: challenges, obstacle courses, tests, and self-maintenance drills. I’m keeping myself sensitive to the world. For example, the knife throwing. I put up the target; I feel its location very carefully with my fingertips. Then I back away from it, counting the steps and feeling the floor with my toetips as I go. Finally, I install myself behind the desk, and
wham!
I always hit it. I can hear the blade entering the cork. A wonderful sound!”

Margaret looked back at the French doors. It was true that there were three knives in the target now, but she also saw around it, on both sides of the door, many gashes in the wood, most of them in the vicinity of the bull’s-eye—but not all. Margaret’s stomach turned. Funny, she had not noticed this on her last visit.

“So, comrade,” the doctor began, her voice becoming more rasping, “have you remembered? Are you ready to talk?”

“No,” said Margaret, irritated, despite her best hopes for the visit. The business with the knife, the lyrics—the doctor was rattling her in record time.

“Really? Nothing at all?” asked the doctor.

“That’s precisely what I wanted to talk to you about. That’s why I’m here.”

“About what?”

“The treatment is not what you said it would be,” said Margaret. “Not at all.”

“What is it then?” asked the doctor.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” the doctor asked.

“Well,” Margaret began. Although she would have liked to speak frankly, she found something rising in her, a column of secretive smoke, that forced her to speak in only vague and encrypted terms. “I haven’t remembered anything, but—there have been changes. In fact, everything has changed. But none of the things I remember are my own life.” Margaret said this and shuddered, thinking of the sibyl in her basket. Come to think of it, the swinging, grey-headed sibyl had borne a striking resemblance to Dr. Arabscheilis.

“But that’s quite fine, my dear, quite fine!” The doctor, for her part, seemed encouraged. “What is it that’s changed?”

Margaret swallowed. “Well, for starters, the buildings,” she said.

“The buildings?” The doctor stopped her in surprise.

“Yes, the buildings,” Margaret said. “They’ve turned into flesh. They’ve turned into flesh and they’re made of that now, instead of brick and stucco …” Her voice trailed off in embarrassment. “Flesh.”

“Flesh!” the doctor said. “Fascinating!”

Margaret was enlivened by the woman’s apparent ready belief. “Yes, they turned into flesh. So I think—in any case, there’s been a—malfunction of some kind. I’m not remembering my own life,” she repeated again, dumbly. And then very forcefully: “I want you to reverse the treatment.”

“If I remember correctly, my pet,” the doctor said, “when I saw you before, you didn’t have any desire to undergo treatment for what was a startlingly acute case of retrograde amnesia, if I may say so. So if you truly have not remembered, what are you complaining about? Isn’t this just how you wanted it?”

Margaret was surprised. She had assumed the doctor had not listened to her at all during the last visit. She cleared her throat. “Yes, that’s right. I was happy as I was.”

“And now you say nothing has changed, and that makes you upset?”

“Well, no.
Something
has changed! The city is made of
fat
. My life is poisoned.” This was truly how she felt in the days since the Sachsenhausen tour and the skittering mice.

“Aha!” the doctor cried, a cat after a dangling string. “So! It worked after all! Tell me, why is your life ‘poisoned’ as you say?”

“I’m doing the things I usually do—”